Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell win the Grammy for Song of the Year and thank “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig for the “Best Film of the Year”

Billie Eilish and her brother and main collaborator Finneas O’Connell won the Song of the Year award at the 2024 Grammys for “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie Soundtrack.

After Lionel Richie announced the winner, Eilish was visibly shocked. “Whoa… Damn, that’s stupid, guys,” the singer said as she took the stage.

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Eilish said she was sure they had “no chance” of winning. “I just want to say, everyone in this category – that was a crazy list of incredible people! Incredible artists. Crazy right now,” she added, referring to her fellow nominees, including SZA, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus.

She also thanked the members of the Recording Academy and O’Connell, whom she described as her “best friend in the world” and who makes me the person I am today.

Eilish also gave special thanks to Barbie Director Greta Gerwig for “best film of the year,” a targeted mention after the headline-grabbing Oscar defeats to Gerwig as director and Margot Robbie as best actress.

“We’re so lucky – we just continue to be profoundly privileged, lucky people,” O’Connell said. “It’s hard to ever feel worthy, but right now that’s definitely not the case. We’re very humbled and very grateful.”

Eilish’s ballad received five nominations at this year’s ceremony, including for Record of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance and Best Music Video. Eilish and O’Connell took the stage earlier to perform the emotional song. Before their performance, they had already won the Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media.

Eilish has won a total of 7 Grammys and has been nominated 25 times. This Grammy was Eilish and O’Connell’s third in the Song of the Year category.

“What Was I Made For” was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Eilish and O’Connell already won the Oscar for Best Original Song for the theme song of the James Bond in 2022 No time to die.

Backstage, Eilish admitted that they had “written absolutely nothing” before writing the song for Barbie. “We were working three days a week and we couldn’t think of anything, and even when we did think of something, it just didn’t feel right, didn’t feel good, didn’t feel real,” she said. “And I was really worried, I was getting nervous, I felt like it was going to be over soon. I was in a really dark place, a really, really dark place, it’s kind of hard to think back on.”

Eilish thanked Gerwig for the “life-changing” opportunity, and also noted that she and O’Connell wrote the song within 24 hours of watching the film. “We wrote it in less than two hours, if not an hour, and honestly from there we were just creative again. I don’t know, it just woke us up and set us on our path and it was really special and powerful and it’s very close to my heart and in my chest,” Eilish said.

Other songs nominated in this category were: “A&W” (Jack Antonoff, Lana Del Rey & Sam Dew), “Anti-Hero” (Jack Antonoff & Taylor Swift), “Butterfly” (Jon Batiste & Dan Wilson), “Dance The Night” (From Barbie The Album, Caroline Ailin, Dua Lipa, Mark Ronson & Andrew Wyatt), “Flowers” ​​(Miley Cyrus, Gregory Aldae Hein & Michael Pollack), “Kill Bill” (Rob Bisel, Carter Lang & Solána Rowe) and “Vampire” (Daniel Nigro & Olivia Rodrigo).

Seven of the eight nominees in the top three categories of this year’s Grammys are female artists – SZA leads with a total of nine nominations, followed by Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Eilish, Miley Cyrus and boygenius with six nominations each.

The Grammy Awards were broadcast live from LA on Sunday on the CBS Television Network. They were also streamed live and on demand on Paramount+. Trevor Noah hosted.

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